tempus fugit

Trump, on his statement “The Press Is the True Enemy of the People” (2018) (per Leslie Stahl, 2016): “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so [that] when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you…”

2018-10-29

Donald J. Trump stated on his Twitter account at 5:03AM Washington time this morning that “There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news.” Inaccurate, and even fraudulent. Now, inaccurate could be an opinion based on a point of view– but fraudulent is a crime. It should be objectively possible to determine if the news media is fraudulently reporting (or not reporting) the news.

The charge of fraudulent reporting is just thrown out there without evidence or context. Instead, the President goes on to say that the press “must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly.” What is more, he adds the epithet “The True Enemy of the People” for the news media. So this is a thing– open and obvious hostility for Trump from members of the news media? It’s not that numerous members of the Democratic Party as well as many of his rivals for the Republican nomination (at least before the Republican Convention, or after they decided to retire) had some pretty awful things to say about him– and there’s no excuse for the press repeating anything those people said, as it wasn’t newsworthy that patriotic leaders (and war heroes) of the Republican Party came right out and said that he was a con man.

It also has nothing to do with the fact that comedy shows on television give much of their time to satirizing, lampooning, and ridiculing the actions of the Trump administration. The news media can’t help that Trump is a gift to comedians that keeps on giving.

So, no, the charge of fraudulent reporting has no basis in fact. It is purely a strategic political policy taken on by Trump at the outset of his campaign to discredit the news media so that any mistakes he makes or lies he gets caught in repeating will not be taken seriously when they are reported in “main-stream news media”. Trump planned to lie repeatedly to the people and the media, and he planned ahead to take away the public’s faith in the news media so that stories about his bad faith and lying would have less impact.

After all, now that the Washington Post has given up counting his lies and misleading statements at 5,000, who is left to care about the carpet of falsehoods that he treads down thinner and thinner every day?